Collateral Damage: Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis and the Victims of War

• In Event: Women and War in Ancient Poetry

Abstract

The language of collateral damage fills the airways, the news outlets, the protests of our time. The suffering of civilians, passive victims of wars, evokes anguish, sympathy and often a sense of inefficacy. Long before the language of collateral damage, the ancient Athenian playwright Euripides, writing under the shadow of the Peloponnesian War, wrote plays that vividly portrayed the suffering experienced by those passive victims (mostly women and children). Most famous among these plays is the Trojan Women, a work that received much attention and multiple productions during the Viet Nam War. Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis is as powerful as the Trojan Women. While the Iphigenia was popular in the nineteenth century, it has received far less attention since then though it too explores collateral damage, but from a very different and (I argue) much more complex perspective. The play tells the wrenching story of a father sacrificing his daughter to the goddess Artemis – and the daughter acquiescing to her sacrifice – so that he may lead his troops to the war while a chorus of women react to the choices that attend a world of male soldiers intent on war. By latching onto the myth of Agamemnon’s choice to perform that sacrifice, Euripides in his Iphigenia in Aulis depicts the tragic tensions that emerge when the suffering is not experienced by the civilians suffering at the hands of the enemy but by those whose lives are most attached through kinship with those engaged in battle. In the very act of attending to that suffering Euripides uses the myth of Iphigenia to explore the complex role of a woman – indeed a girl – who transforms herself from victim to an active participant in the military endeavor when she chooses (in Euripides’ version) to sacrifice herself willingly. Euripides’ tragedy thus becomes a complex meditation on the multiple sides and meanings of collateral damage.

Author

• Arlene W. Saxonhouse, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor